L917] OTHEP- T

and resumed hostilities. Upon February 24. I91S.
the Bolsheviks capitulated, and en 3rd March the
Peace of Brest-Litovsk was signed. There was no
longer any talk of H3gotiations; the terns, far
harder than those put forward at Brest-Litovsk, wers
row dictated by the conqueror to the conquered.
Trotski and Radek might have resisted, but Lenin
declared for surrender, and his influence prevailed.

The results were grave indeed for the Allies. By
the Peace Germany gained the Ukraine and access
to the Black Sea,. Thus at a moment when she had
limited the active war to one single front in the
West she had also won possession of supply grounds
in the East, of which the potentialities were un-
known. Oil, foodstuffs, and cotton would now
escape the inesh of the blockade. She had made
conquests which, even conceding a stalemate in the
West, would leave her with the most solid and
tangible profits from the war. On the other hand,
the downfall of Russia had taught the world two
facts which might yet be worth all the immediate
disasters. It had done much among thinking men
to discredit crude and facile schemes of social
revolution. And it had cast a high light upon the
policy of Germany, and revealed her as unchanged
from the war mood of August 1914. She had annexed
shamelessly, and had imposed terms of bitter humil-
iation and loss upon the unfortunate peoples that
had fallen into her hand. Her mind was plain, her
purpose writ so large that the most stubborn German
apologist among the Allies could not but read it.
More than ever did the war appear as a struggle to
323 22